Madwoman in the Attic
{{Madwoman in the Attic}}
Basic Info
- Author: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
- Year: 2020
- Type: #secondary1
Summary (brief)
-Towards a Feminist Poetics is about writing being a source of power (pen as penis) that has been historically inaccessible to women; creative energy in women = unfeminine and therefore monstrous monstrous depictions of interiority language creates a physical identity.
Two archetypes: the submissive angel, or the destructive monster.
Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre's attic = a psychological double of Jane herself - acting out the rage that society forbade Jane from expressing.
Major Themes
Key Passages / Quotes
Quote 1
quote:: “Since both patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women, before women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept from them they must escape just those male texts which, defining them as "Cyphers," deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives to the authority that has imprisoned them and kept them from attempting the pen.”
page:: 13
themes:: freedom, gender, hating women
Quote 1
quote:: “Lenderer remarks upon woman's own tendency to "kill" herself into art in order to "appeal to man".”
page:: 13
themes:: pick-me-girl, hating women
Quote 2
quote:: “A life of feminine submission of 'contemplative purity,' a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story”
page:: 42
themes:: #monstrous-femine
Genre Notes
Characters / Concepts (if relevant)
Because no rhetoric existed to discuss W+W desire, Lucy Snowe in Villette is trapped literally by patriarchal language; she describes "loneliness" to the priest. Alaimo in Bodily Natures similarly describes the way we don't have the rhetoric to describe nature.
The woman writer
The angel in the house
The monster
The double
Theory Connections
Related Texts
My Argument / Interpretation
Dissertation Relevance
How could this matter to my project?
-Gilbert and Gubar explain that women writers were writing proto-autofiction; they could not tell their direct memoirs due to Victorian censorship so they channeled it into the bodies of fictional monsters